Monday, August 18, 2014

“True Blood” Season 7, Episode 9: “Love is to Die”

The wake for "True
Blood" - which is really what the second half of this season has felt like -
continued with more characters making their peace and accepting their fates.
It's certainly not the most exciting way to wrap up a show - there is no Big
Bad, no real threat left to menace our protagonists (except the Yakuza,
but...come on). But I'm actually grateful that we get to see these characters
prepare for the great TV graveyard in the sky. Most series finales give us
maybe a 10-minute epilogue that shows us what happens to characters we've spent
years watching. This show has given us half a season of people basically
getting their affairs in order. That sense of finality is appropriate for a
show that is, when you get down to it, largely about life and death. And that
was underlined in the penultimate episode.

First, some
housecleaning: Sam is gone. As in, totally packed up his trailer, resigned from
his position as mayor, moving to Chicago to be with that supremely annoying
woman and what I hope will be a litter of mogs (half
man, half dog) in her uterus. We discover his abandonment of the town when Sookie and Jessica showed up at his trailer - for no reason
whatsoever! - to find letters left for Sook and Andy Bellefleur. Sam
laid out his reasoning, but it would resonate a whole lot stronger if he wasn't
ditching a place he'd committed to leading for a person he knocked up within
hours of meeting. The relationship between Sam and Nicole has been so poorly
executed - in part because it happened so quickly, in part because Nicole is
generally insufferable - that it has, in turn, made Sam radioactive for me. He
was always a drip, but at this point, I'm glad he's gone. This show did that
character very few favors. And Rob Ford is glad that at least in some fictitious
universe, there is actually a mayor less competent than him. The upshot to the
abrupt Sam defection: the TV show is definitely not going to end the same way
the books did!

The bulk of the
episode dealt with two love triangles: Sookie/Bill/Eric
and Jessica/Hoyt/Jason (and all of the tertiary characters sucked into their
drama vortices). Although it is arguably the more important one, I'll tackle
the Sookie one first. Last episode ended with a
cliffhanger, with Vampire Bill refusing to drink Sarah Newlin's
blood, thus curing him of Hep V. Bill clumsily
attempted to justify what is basically his elective suicide. Nobody in the room
agreed with him (except for probably Sarah...), and in fact some responded by
delivering multiple hard slaps to the face. Later, in a somewhat odd scene that
I rather liked, Bill explained his reasoning to Eric: he's doing this for Sookie. As he has stated multiple times over the course of
the series, he brings her nothing but darkness and death. Just as vampires are
attracted to fairies for their light, fey are attracted to vamps for their
dark. That may be the corniest analogy for the allure of a bad boy I've ever
read, but damned if isn't pretty accurate. Bill knows that if he lives on, Sookie will never be free of him. And while it's never said
explicitly, I got the strong impression that Bill was warning Eric off of her
as well (this episode definitely was playing up the Eric/Sookie
romance). So by accepting the True Death, Bill believes he is, in some way,
VERY late in the game, being chivalrous.

Even though it's
infuriating, this turn of events actually makes logical sense. Bill never
wanted to be a vampire. He's been self-loathing ever since we met him. He did
embrace his situation in the seasons where he was vampire king of Louisiana and
(*shudder*) Billith. But in general, he has always
resented what he was turned into. This current trajectory for Bill feels very
full circle to me.

The Jessica plot is
less instrumental to the show's endgame (I'm guessing), but had all The Feels.
After Bill refused the cure, Jessica demanded that he release her from her
maker bonds; he did so, and it was very sad. At first I worried that Jess was
going to do something apocalyptically stupid - kill Sarah Newlin,
attack the Yakuza, force Bill to drink the cure, go public with its existence -
but instead she just went to Hoyt's house, where she interrupted another fight
between Hoyt and his girlfriend, Bridget. This was a fairly selfish move on
Jess's part, but at least she admitted it herself. After she started telling
Hoyt about their shared past, which she glamored out
of his memory, Bridget lost her shit, Jason came over, Hoyt punched Jason the eff out, and Jessica and Hoyt had several really lovely
reunion scenes that essentially boiled down Jessica's whole existence on this
show, and reminded us of how much she changed. And then, they totally did it.
While the Bill and Sookie sex scene from two episodes
back was hard to watch because it was just so...grim, this one was hard to watch
because it seemed like something that should have really been private.

I was worried when the
show brought Hoyt back, thinking that nothing good could possibly come of it
for him, Jess, or Jason. But I was wrong. Unless something absolutely horrible
happens next episode (TOTALLY POSSIBLE), it looks like Hoyt and Jess will get a
happy ending. And that's so cute.

Meanwhile, Jason and
Bridget predictably got together, but not TOGETHER together.
The shared a few charming scenes, and Bridget determined that she was going to
teach Jason how to be friends with a girl and not sleep with her. Which may be
exactly what Jason Stackhouse needs. (It was actually a great Jason episode
too, more or less distilling all of his best qualities. Minus the gratuitous
nudity. Which was missed.)

Finally, in between
playing Sookie's errand boy, Eric found time to
finally have sex with Ginger. Kind of. In a spectacularly silly yet hilariously
perfect scene, Ginger got to have her way with Mr. Northman, exactly as she had
always imagined it. Readers, I'll need you to give me your interpretation of
that scene, but I'm not sure Eric even, um, unsheathed, before Ginger went into
a full-body climax and a beffudled Eric left her
crumpled, blissed out, and snoring on the floor. Oh, Ginger. My hope is that,
with Sam gone, she will be elected the new Mayor of Bon Temps. She cannot
possibly be worse than her predecessor. And the mayoral fashions would be
STUNNING!

Pam dyed Sarah Newlin's hair in preparation of selling her around to the
highest Hep V-infected bidders, gave her some sage
advice ("You were born a hooker, and you're going to die a hooker")...and then
was promptly captured by the Yakuza. Again. This is at least the third time
this season that Pam has been taken prisoner by the Yakuza. Humans. Just regular
humans, with guns and swords. I've got a problem with that. Pam's
characterization on this show has been problematic for a few seasons now, but
based on the way they've treated her lately, she's either stupid or weak. I
don't think either thing is true of Pamela de Beaufort. She has been turned
into Bargaining Chip Against Eric more times than I
care to count, and it's lazy, lazy writing. I think the show is better than
that, and the character and actress SURE as hell are better than that. We ended
the episode with her chained to a table by the Yakuza, a giant stake over her
heart, as Mr. Gus grilled Eric about whether or not Sookie
knew about Sarah/the cure. After Eric admitted that she did, Mr. Gus asked for
her address, just as Vampire Bill came a-callin' at
the Stackhouse Manse of Murder. So in the season finale, death is literally
coming knocking on Sookie's door. Subtlety: this show
is not interested in it, which is true to its nature. I wonder how many more
people will die in that kitchen.